At the end of one of her brief, athletic poems, the Polish
poet, Anna Swir writes, “My body, you are an animal/for whom
ambition/is right/Splendid possibilities/are open to us.”

Henri
Oguike Dance Company, making their United States debut in
the Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow last week, shows us
the splendid possibilities of bodies in motion.

Henri Oguike’s choreography and eight dancers have garnered
high praise and various prizes in the United Kingdom where
Oguike started the company. Lots of London voices—in Time
Out, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer,
The Guardian—have weighed in with accolades. But it
is hardly a “British” company. The dancers are from all over
the place—Japan, Portugal, Finland, the Netherlands, Paraguay.
Oguike himself was born of Welsh and Nigerian parents. So
what links this diverse lot of dancers isn’t an affinity for
Merce Cunningham’s or Mark Morris’ style—Oguike’s is frequently,
favorably compared to both—but a brightly cerebral physicality,
the brain and body both candidly alive and at work.

White
Space, set to excerpts from Scarlatti’s keyboard works,
is a sextet of dancers in white, five girls, one boy, at first
apparently genderless bodies responding to sound, three in
skirts, three in tights, framed in Mondrian-esque projections
on the back screen. It’s all strangely both very fast and
very sculptural, bodies shooting through space phrase-by-phrase
with the harpsichord in the short keyboard pieces. Then the
sculptural takes on the emotional and the girls move through
short couplings with the boy—it’s not a pas de deux or trois,
but pas de multiples, each of the dancers coyly, competitively,
playfully, but never wistfully, engaging, separating, re-engaging—at
Scarlatti speed.

Expression
Lines is a solo—Saturday danced by the choreographer—that
is mostly an homage to the Malinese guitarist Ali Farka Toure.
Toure, called the “bluesman of Africa” because of his cross-mixed
American blues and Arabic-influenced Malian sound, wrote “Niafunke”
as a tone-poem to his hometown. Oguike’s choreography embraces
the contrasts of sky and sand, action and stillness, intensity
and contemplation embodying the haunting yearning of Toure’s
piece.

After Tiger Dancing, the third piece on the program,
was over, the annoying woman in front of me asked her son,
“Didn’t they seem just like tigers?” and he answered, as if
she had asked if it were snowing outside, “No.”

No, despite its name and the program note’s allusion to the
Blake poem (“Tyger, tyger burning bright . . .”) tigers are
just the starting point. The rest is all human. Though Oguike
is cited again and again as a choreographer who embodies musicality,
he also embodies the body. In both White Space
and here, there is an energy beyond the athletic pursuit of
making music visible; there is sexual energy—playful, fierce
and nimble. In the classic children’s story, “Little Brave
Sambo” the tigers turn to butter. In Tiger Dancing
they turn, sublimely, into flesh.

Though what came before it could scarcely be considered an
amuse-bouche, Second Signals is clearly meant
to be—and succeeds at being—the program’s piece de resistance.
Taiko is Japanese for ‘big drums’ and that’s exactly
what we see when seven dancers paired with three drummers
take the stage. Taiko drums have a history spanning not simply
centuries but vital ritual use: scaring the enemy, awakening
the rain gods, calling the townsfolk, inspiring sacred chanting
and now, dizzying the audience. If it does nothing else, Second
Signals hammers home the truth at the margins between
divisions—we’re all part of each other and nothing much is
only itself. So the dancers make sounds, the musicians make
dance. This has to mean that boundaries are meant more for
exploring than for breaking.